I was mulling over the recent move and job change last night and it occurred to me that since 1992, I’ve never applied for a job and been rejected - every position I’ve interviewed for, I’ve been offered, and I’ve only turned down a position once. This covers 7 different sets of interviews. Wierd, huh? Is it because I’m selective about what I apply for? Because I’m damned lucky? Because my employers would have taken any warm body? Suddenly I feel very fortunate, I’ve watched some of my friends struggle with their employment situations over the years and my brother just went through 6 months of uncertainty as he tried to land his first job out of college. Of course, my experience in 1991 was similar to his I guess. Anyway, dunno why this dawned on me last night but I did find it interesting.

Here’s a cool website - a compendium of games which while originall commercially released have since been released for free to the public. Many have also had their source code released in one form or another. Some of these releases have led to excellent modern implementations of old, classic games, whilst others are languishing. Find a local programmer and incent him to get to work on one of your old favorites. Me, I’d love to see a project manager take over the Freespace 2 project - technically some of the stuff that’s been released using that code is excellent, but it’s all over the map, and from an outsider peering in, it looks like they need a project manager to bring order (and discipline) to the chaos. Which is a shame, since it’s the finest space sim ever, by a long shot.

I’m always on the lookout for replacements for the starches I can no longer eat. Spaghetti squash or julienned zuchini have replaced pasta, for example, and cauliflower has replaced mashed potatoes. But I’ve struggled to find a satisfying replacement for rice in asian cooking. Until this weekend, anyway. When I was in New York a month or so ago, I noticed an atkins-friendly meal on a chinese take out joint’s menu that mentioned mung bean sprouts in place of rice. I tried it this weekend and it’s great, finally something satisfying to lay my chinese food down on top of. Mung bean sprouts are already found extensively in chinese cooking, so they’re a natural fit. I also suspect this will be good with indian food though, I’ll test that sometime in the next week or so. They’re relatively inexpensive too, and easy to prepare, I just steam them for 10 minutes or so.

I mentioned last week that I would do this…erm, last week But anyway I’m getting around to it today. Snipsnap has made it incredibly easy to get a weblog/wiki hybrid running on your own machine. Simply go to their site and click on the java webstart link in the upper right hand corner, execute the file, answer some simple questions, and viola, you’ve got a wiki running on your local machine.

Mind that you’ll need the appropriate version of java for your platform installed, and you should also be mindful of your network and the implications of installing a webserver on it. If you’re at work and reading this, it’s highly likely you shouldn’t do this.

Others, have fun. Snipsnap has its quirks but is a great way to get introduced to how wikis work.

Well, sort of. I’ve been harping about wikis off and on for the last year and a half or so. In part I’ve become so enamored with them because of a project I helped design at Bowdoin, The Romantic Audiences Project, which was very successful on a number of levels. More levels than I knew, in fact, since the most recent issue of the Educause Review uses the Bowdoin project as one of the examples of the effective use of a wiki in higher ed. I was psyched to discover this today.

The instructor I worked on this with, Mark Phillipson, also asked me to help him write a piece about RAP and wikis for a literary journal that should be published soon, I’ll post more about that as soon as it’s published.

We had a super muggy hot weekend this weekend with some torrential rains. Reminded me of one of the things I miss most in Maine, which coincidentally one of my favorite Bowdoin colleague’s posted a great shot of - the awesome rocky coastline.

Check out more of Mike’s site if you’re so inclined, he posts a picture every day, many of which are really awesome.

Think old school. Think classic arcade and console games. Then think Robotron 2084 with just a dash of Tron Deadly discs. Got your imagination running? Ok now go check out Doomed!. Was it anything like you imagined?

It’s nearly perfect. My only complaint is it’s a bit too easy, once you clear a few levels and build up your stats. Here’s hoping they make another version. I’d love to have the original .fla files for this, it’s ripe for tweaking.

File this under the ‘we don’t need no steenking flash’ category, err, which I don’t actually have Anyway, check out this excellent isometric map of Washington DC. Someone posted a link to it in today’s University Web Administrator’s digest. This an awesome alternative to the too often used flash-based university maps that have popped up in the past couple if years. Javascript and html, and an art style that evokes simcity. Me likes! Note that it’s basically broken in Safari on OSX, use firefox or your favorite flavor of mozilla on a mac, ie also works fine on the PC.

I’ve talked endlessly about wikis here. More evidence of their mounting popularity - Socialtext closed a round of financing this week. When the venture capitalists start circling you can infer that at least some (smart) folks think there’s a broad market to be served.

One of these days I’ll get around to opening one of the wikis I’m running on this box to the public. Meantime I’ll post later today about how you can easily get one running on your own box.

Can you tell I’m researching games in education this morning? I’ve actually known about this project for quite some time but I keep forgetting to blog about it. The Education Arcade is using the Neverwinter Nights game engine, originally constructed to play Dungeons and Dragons online with friends or at home solo, to build a mockup of a North American community during the dawn of the Revolutionary War. Students will be able to role play their way through a simulation of society at that period in time. This is just absolutely brilliant. I could have almost directly applied this work to coursework at Bowdoin - we had an instructor who taught a course in revolutionary france and he would have his students role play being members of french society at that time (aristocracy, the petit bourgeoisie and so on) using a threaded discussion board. Imagine the horizons this would have opened up.

There’s a big grant just screaming to be written here building off of this work. What if I built a larger scale version of this, 100’s of players at once. In simple terms this kind of project can be the textbook of the modern age. Read about the french revolution? Yeah that’s important, but I can BE the french revolution. Which do you think will stick in the kid’s heads, today’s kids, raised on interactivity?

I need to get my doctorate. Not that this is insight on my part, as the link clearly indicates there are many others working on this stuff, but there’s vast opportunity here for me to do the kinds of things I love doing, right as these kinds of projects are starting to take off.

I’ve spent the last several years adovcating for the use of games in education. I was fortunate to have a boss who was receptive to the notion (and in fact had led the development of one application prior to my arrival at Bowdoin, but though we dabbled with the Sims Online, no projects emerged during my time there (though I did ultimately contribute to the Flight to Freedom project). Today I happened across this proposal for a PhD. She’s going to study ‘learning’ in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), a genre of games I’ve tinkered quite a bit with myself. Seeing proposals like this make me consider actually moving on to my doctorate - if the work can be fun for me and as engaging as I am sure this proposal will end up being, why not go for it?

Give yourself a quick chuckle - check out this poor fellow and his trouble with a fly. Note that you need the flash plugin.

Mostly I try to be modest, and to be honest what I’m about to describe didn’t take a rocket scientiest to recognize, but I did recognize it wereas most did not so….today’s New York Times has a short piece on the use of weblogs in education and how they’re approaching the tipping point. Why am I pleased with myself? Because I was doing this 2.5 years ago at Bowdoin, well ahead of the curve in terms of technology use. This is why if you manage an academic technology program at a small liberal arts college, you should consider hiring me
Kidding aside, I do love the (very) occasional opportunity to feel just a bit smug. You know when something hits the pages of the NY Times that it’s entering the public’s awareness, and being and staying ahead of that curve is a big piece of what I’m all about.

Now this is useful. A clever hacker has put together RSS feeds for tv listings. Big deal you say? Imagine using the ‘watches’ feature of FeedDemon to build your own customized news feed that automatically makes you aware of, oh, say, every mention of the NY Giants football team, or Lucille Ball or every episode of Law and Order (wait, strike that, too many episodes ;-)…anyway, then using a little more imagination, stitch this into your handy RSS Calendar and you’ve got….something cool? Too much TV to the detriment of your reading habits? I’ll vote for something cool and never miss an episode of Cowboy Beebop again.

Bowdoin College is hiring for the position I vacated when I left to come to Skidmore College. You can check out the job listing on their site or click the link below for a locally archived copy of the job description since the link above will eventually go away, wereas my weblog won’t. I had an exit interview with both my boss and his boss before I left and I’m mildly gratified to see that they seem to in large part be agreeing with what I said about my position and how it could best be evolved to better serve the needs of the college.

I don’t know what they’ll pay my replacement but I can say that I was being paid in the high 50’s and my expectation is they’ll raise that somewhat for the new person since there are a few new reauirements, notably the masters degree which I don’t currently have. Oh, and I still think the title is terrible (more…)

Pivotal games announced that they’re releasing the source code to the RTS Warzone 2100. This is excellent - the game, released years ago, was one of the best RTS of its generation, right up there with Total Annihilation in my opinion. Fans have been trying to score the source code for at least 3-4 years now, it’s really fantastic that they’ve managed to do so. Let’s hope this leads to good stuff, like what we’ve seen with the doom and quake source releases.

Today’s unavoidable spontaneous purchase was a copy of UberGoober on DVD, not because in many ways the title reflects who I am, but because kidding aside it covers Board, War and Roleplaying gaming, all of which I spent a good part of my youth playing. It’s Trekkies for Dungeons and Dragons nerds, basically, and while I’m no longer a member of this crowd the sad little secret is that sometimes I wish I still was
Anyway the DVD is apparently pretty good. There’s a review on RPG.net if you’re interested.

Ok this is pretty silly but it cracked me up when I stumbled across it today, it was a .sig file in a posting to a threaded discussion board, reproduced verbatim:

“In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share
a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and
are looking for a new relationship. ”
– Anonymous

I give you a free win32 conversion of the classic old games workshop game Heroquest. It runs much better than the other available version, which was written for DOS over 10 years ago. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Heroquest is a poor man’s Dungeons and Dragons, played on a board with miniatures, and was originally published in the UK by Games Workshop then brought to the US by (Hasbro? Milton Bradley?). You can review the boardgamegeek.com entry if you’re interested in more background, or just grab the download from the link above if you want to tinker with it, it takes 5 minutes to review how it works and get down to playing.

If you’re like me, you’ve got gigs of mp3 on your hard drive, and perhaps you’ve been a little lax in terms of making sure the id3 tags are accurate when you ripped the music from your cd collection. Or maybe you’re grabbing a lot of it off of edonkey/dc++/usenet/caracho/whatever, where the metadata quality is all over the map. If you’ve got a portable mp3 player this can be a big hassle, since without accurate metadata the files won’t neccesarily play in the correct order or even let you know the artist and song title of the individual tracks. There are solutions to this, like itunes, mexp or the builtin media browsers in players like QCD and winamp, but each has its issues. My favorite tool up until now has been Tag & Rename, but it’s a little spendy for a one trick pony. Enter The Godfather. It’s donationware - give them what you think it’s worth - and it works great, integrating with the CDDB and Allmusic.com. The interface is equal to Tag & Rename’s, and it’s speedy. Check it out of your mp3 collection is starting to get unwieldy, it’s well worth the effort to clean now and then.